Feeling Cinnamon-tal

FEELING CINNAMON-TAL

By David W. Brown

Few things conjure the spirit of the holidays like cinnamon, the spice renowned as an improver of lattes, maker of swirly rolls, and Frenchifier of toast. Love pumpkin spice? Then you love cinnamon, which is a key ingredient. Interestingly, the ubiquitous spice has a species that is tightly embraced in this part of the world. If you traveled to Southeast Asia, Christmas would smell slightly different. Why? Because there are all sorts of cinnamons, each unique in its own way.

The holidays mean you are probably seasoning the daylights out of all manner of food and drink. Cinnamon in your coffee, cinnamon on your pie, cinnamon in your spice rack — to us, that cinnamon is the real cinnamon. It just happens to be the special kind of cinnamon that is embraced in the United States and perhaps best suited to our dishes. The rolls, the twists, and the Toast Crunch — they use a variety of cinnamon called cassia cinnamon. Your house swirls with the strongest scent of Hallmark movies out there. The spice you bought from Rouses Markets with “Cinnamon” on the label is a variety called cassia cinnamon.

If you traveled to Sri Lanka, you would encounter a cinnamon very different from our own (just as if you bought a bottle of Coke there, it would taste entirely different). There are four main types of cinnamon. Cinnamomum verum, also called Ceylon cinnamon, is native to Sri Lanka. Cinnamomum burmannii, or Korintje cinnamon, is grown across Southeast Asia. Cinnamomum loureiroi, sometimes called royal cinnamon or Saigon cinnamon, is a Vietnam species. And Cinnamomum cassia — or more famously, cassia cinnamon — is grown widely across Asia, extensively in China, and even domestically. It is so popular here that we don’t even need to specify its species: We just call it “cinnamon.”

Cinnamon, in other words, is more than a single thing. Indeed, most spices have all sorts of variations. Curry, pepper, paprika — they each have special variations with subtle differences in their flavor profiles.

Cinnamon is one of the oldest spices that humans have ever known. The ancient Babylonians were trading it four and a half millennia ago. And it wasn’t always just a food flavoring. It was also a meat preservative — very important in the days before the Rouses meat department came along. The ancient Egyptians used it for mummifying their pharaohs and elites. You could burn it for ceremonies religious and otherwise. The stuff smells great.

But it was expensive. You are living in the golden age of cinnamon.

Today, you can dash off to Rouses and grab a jar of cinnamon in powder form or cinnamon sticks for a couple of dollars. In ancient Rome, cinnamon was fifteen times more expensive than silver. (Allegedly, after Nero slew his wife in a fit of anger, in her funeral pyre, he burned a year’s worth of the city supply of cinnamon to show how sorry he was. As a gentleman should.) Its high price was in part due to its scarcity, and in part due to its mystique.

For much of the history of the Western world, people generally did not know where cinnamon came from. Because Ancient Greece, for example, did not have the internet, if you did not know something, you just sort of guessed and believed the wrong thing your entire life. In this case, because only a rarified few knew where cinnamon actually originated, the legends around it were legion and fantastical.

Aristotle wrote of the “cinnamon bird,” who — according to those in the know — would fly to unknown places that humans could not reach, grab sticks of cinnamon, and build their nests out of the rare and wonderful spice. Inhabitants of this mysterious land would attach weights to the tips of their arrows, shoot them at treetops, and collect the sticks from downed cinnamon bird nests.

Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, believed giant cinnamon birds lived in Arabia, and built their nests on the sides of steep cliffs. To get the cinnamon, Arabians would slay their oxen and lure the birds with heavy ox meat. The big birds would swoop down, grab the meat, carry it to their nests, and the weight would cause the whole thing to collapse. Traders would thus gather the downed cinnamon nests and send them to the west to improve the smells of meat and millionaires.

Pliny the Elder, a general and naturalist, thought Herodotus was an idiot, and said cinnamon growers and traders made up these stories to artificially inflate the price of cinnamon. No, Virginia, there is no cinnamon bird.

Old Pliny was correct. All the secrecy was because importers guarded their sources tightly to keep prices high, competition away, and traders secure. (Being a spice trader in ye olden days was hard, brutish work with peril around every corner, much like being a parent tasked with hiding all those gifts from the kids.)

Today, by far the biggest exporter of Ceylon cinnamon is Sri Lanka (the country was once called Ceylon). The biggest grower of cassia is China. Why do different countries grow different varieties? The answer is the climate. Each variation requires its own constraints on the highs and lows of temperature and humidity in order to survive. Ceylon cinnamon needs it to be hot and humid, and to never get too cold. Okay, so that sounds like Louisiana — so why don’t we grow it here? For Ceylon, it has to be really hot and humid. The U.S. Department of Agriculture divides the nation up into “hardiness zones” to help farmers know what can grow where. Montana, where the snow is thick enough to film a Hallmark movie, is mostly Zone 3. Ceylon cinnamon, in comparison, grows in Zones 10 and 11. Most of Louisiana is in the parameters of Zone 9. We’re practically a winter wonderland compared to Ceylon cinnamon country.

The spice we call cinnamon comes from the inner bark of any number of cinnamon tree varieties. To get the cinnamon we know and love, the tree is pruned in such a way that shoots grow from it, and those shoots grow and develop a bark. Eventually, the bark is stripped from the tree, and the interior of the bark is separated from the exterior. The interior is dried and curls naturally into the shape and color of cinnamon sticks.

The reason cassia cinnamon is so popular here, and not Ceylon cinnamon or Saigon cinnamon, is that cassia cinnamon thrives in Zone 9, and thus is both a domestic product and also grown extensively in Asia and elsewhere. The differences between cassia, Ceylon, royal, and Korintje cinnamon can be found in various degrees of coarseness, different shades of brown, varying levels of bitterness and sweetness, and overall robustness of flavor. Cassia cinnamon is quite pungent, in a glorious holiday season way — it just hits you in the head when you walk into a bakery — whereas Ceylon and other cinnamon varieties are more subtle or slightly sweeter-smelling.

How, you might be wondering, is this spice so associated with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and wintertime generally? It goes back to its associations with immortality (the reason the Egyptians embalmed pharaohs), its preservative properties, and its high value. One of Job’s daughters in the Old Testament was named Keziah, a word that — you guessed it — traces its lineage to cassia cinnamon, which was very valuable. Multiple references in the Bible and holy texts of many religions help the association between the holidays and the smell.

Wintertime is obviously a time when preservatives would, historically, be necessary. And the season just brims with little acts of defiance over death. Just look around you. The reason there’s a Christmas tree in your house is that it is an evergreen. When the rest of nature is brown or leafless, there in your home is a vibrant green symbol of life and renewal. Over time, the associations between cinnamon’s scent and winter became inseparable.

For us, it is the smell of winter and cassia. Though your gingerbread man might be different from a Sri Lankan or Vietnamese gingerbread man, they share in their soft-baked hearts a common truth. You could say there is a whole family of cinnamons, and what are the holidays if not a time for family with a little dash of magic? It is what the cinnamon bird would have wanted.